About

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Decoder Magazine is foremost an attempt to interpret a world of culture and media in which the preeminent players have been the newly liberated human and the ambitious constellation of niche communities that new resources have given us digital beings unparalleled access to. Never before have so many human beings had so great a will to curate the universes around themselves or been as well equipped for it. Discussions of good and bad art have, after a long unfashionability, been replaced by tension over the means of popular access, new systems of personal art advocacy, and a growing sense of what exactly drives successful creative communities. We believe that society's new emphasis on personal curation will grow as more gain access... to the internet, to resources, and to new behaviors. Through selected essays and prose, poetry and interviews, and a variety of multimedia features, Decoder hopes to follow the vein of humans who transcend momentary fashions, creating timeless novelties and monuments to the menagerie of human perception.

Decoder is an outgrowth of Get Off the Coast, a North Carolina music blog that expanded its cast of writers over 2010 and 2011, becoming only one part of a larger, homespun arts collective that also runs tape and vinyl label Crash Symbols and participated in Pitchfork Media's ensemble music blog project Altered Zones, before it's dissolution late in 2011. In 2011, the editors and writers at Get Off the Coast concluded that it was important to reconceptualize - the name "get off the coast" was itself a moniker that mostly referenced entirely temporary conditions - and Decoder is the result.

Having said that, thanks so much for reading this far and thanks for your support! Your contribution will go towards offsetting the costs of printing, with the remaining financial support being set aside as seed capital for a much hoped for expansion and a host of other projects we hope to pursue after publication. We've set our financial goal a little higher than we wanted to, but we feel like it's really important that the quality of printing reflect the quality of the magazine's content, so we want to make sure we can afford to display new artwork and comics in full color.

Mixtapes as a phenomenon find their impetus in infinite variations on human and social themes. You can make one for a friend and feel good about having gotten to turn someone on to a particular band or they can be hollow, fatuous promotional tools. Although we can't claim to be your neighborhood music hook-up and we can't deny thinking that it's in our best interest to showcase music we think is great, we think what these musicians are doing, as much as our content contributors, is important. This and all future issues of Decoder will include a free digital mixtape - digital because, despite our conceits about format, we're even more conceited about making great music accessible. In any event, we love making them... if you want a sense of what this will be like, check out another we recently did with French digital imprint Beko-DSL... you should probably check them out regardless, actually.

For our inaugural mix we've inclined towards the eclectic. You may recognize some of the names on the list below, but we wanted to emphasize early on that these mixtapes will entail shared discoveries. We found new music mid-assembly, just like we hope you will. They're all exclusive tracks, so you won't discover the particular songs (at least), anywhere else.

Recently featured in the final issue of MOME, the debut issue of Study Group Magazine, and Nobrow #6, Malachi Ward is a California based artist and musician, as well as one of our favorite comic makers in the universe right now. We all expect he'll have so many book deals in 2012 that at some point he'll wonder why he bothered making a comic for us without getting an advance.

Contributors at the $75 reward level will receive this signed, limited edition print of the title page from Ward's new comic On The Displaced World:

Contributors at the $250 reward level will receive one of these two original drawings, signed by the author (first come first serve):

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All of the above, minus print and poster, plus you get an entire page of Decoder to do whatever you’d like with. We’ll set some guidelines and timetables, but this is 99% your game - whether it’s an advertisement or a happy anniversary shout out.